The 20 Best Quotes From Ayn Rand

Townhall.com ^ | July 20, 2012 | John Hawkins

[Kaslin]

20) "Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil."

19) "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

18) "Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent."

17) "Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish — man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish — man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish — man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom — by instinct.”

16) "And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men."

15) "Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."

14) "I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

13) "Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production."

12) "Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion — when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."

11) "We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality."

10) "Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off."

9) "The right to life is the source of all rights -- and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave."

8) "An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes."

7) "Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)."

6) "The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles."

5) "The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

4) "The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see."

3) "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

2) "America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way."

1) "We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."

[Misterioso]

I base it on the fact that he despises atheists. Correct me if I have been misunderstanding his outlook.

[MarkL]

#12 is the current state of US society.

#2 is exactly what Obama is attacking in his speeches.

Mark

[BuckeyeTexan]

One of my favorite articles regarding Rand, reason, and The Gospel:

Reconciling Ayn Rand with the Gospel
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2709408/posts

One of the hallmarks of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy is the supremacy of an individual’s capacity for logic and reason. Those two words, logic and reason, appear over and over again in all of Rand’s writings. Here is a quote from Rand herself, emphasis mine:

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

The Christian reconciliation of all of this lies in the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verse one: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In John’s creation narrative, he immediately identifies and establishes Jesus Christ as divine, co-eternal with God the Father, begotten, not made. Today, we simply say that Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. But what we must focus on in terms of this discussion is the word that John uses to name and identify Jesus: John calls Him “the Word.” In the original Greek, the word John uses is “Logos.” The word “logos” in Greek is the same word used for the concepts of logic and reason. This Greek root is indeed the etymological source for the modern English word “logic.” What John did in the very first sentence of his Gospel is to specifically identify Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, as Logic and Reason Itself. Logic and reason are intrinsic, constitutive qualities of God. They are His essence. They are who He is. This is why Christ identified Himself as “The Truth.”

[BuckeyeTexan]

Here are 3 more Bible verses that demonstrate the part reason plays in God's plan for man. (emphasis mine)

Romans 1:18-20 NIV The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

In short, if mankind denies the existence of God, he inherently ignores reason and logic because God revealed himself through the nature of his creations.

[Tenacious 1]

RE Post #85

Very effective analysis of Rand. Execellent post.

I have said, only pay attention to the politics of Rand, not the morals, values or examples she set.

[MaryLou1]

thanks for posting these